Isabel Cruz

Isabel Cruz was an American Portuguese computer scientist known for her research on databases, knowledge representation, geographic information systems, AI, visual languages, graph drawing, user interfaces, multimedia, information retrieval, and security. She was a University of Illinois Chicago and a Professor in the at the . She was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Life

Cruz was born in Lisbon. In her young life she looked up to Joan of Arc and Marie Curie. Her favorite quotes from Joan & Marie were "All battles are first won or lost, in the mind" and "Have no fear of perfection; you'll never reach it" respectively. completed a MS and PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto advised by Alberto O. Mendelzon. She conducted her postdoctoral research at Brown University advised by Paris Kanellakis. She was the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1996. Cruz joined the University of Illinois Chicago College of Engineering in 2001. She was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019 and was appointed in 2020. Cruz's research focused on databases, big data, geographic information systems, Semantic Web, and knowledge representation. Towards the end of her career, she hoped that her research in data acquisition could be used to aid in novel solutions for social and humanitarian issues.
She died on September 19, 2021.

, elected "for her distinguished contributions to visual query languages, information integration and visualization, geospatial computing and for professional leadership in the data management community".
University of Illinois Chicago Distinguished Professor
University of Illinois Faculty Scholar Award
University of Illinois Chicago Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholar Award
University of Illinois Chicago College of Engineering Faculty Research Award
University of Illinois Chicago Teaching Recognition Program Award
Association for Computing Machinery Recognition of Service Award
National Science Foundation CAREER Award

Cruz was married to Roberto Tamassia, also a noted computer scientist. She enjoyed several hobbies such as running, cross country skiing, standup paddle boarding, and classical music.